“Cloud computing” is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services). The shared pool of configurable computing resources can be rapidly provisioned via virtualization and released with low management effort or service provider interaction, and then scaled accordingly. A cloud computing model can be composed of various characteristics (e.g., on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, measured service, etc), service models (e.g., Software as a Service (“SaaS”), Platform as a Service (“PaaS”), Infrastructure as a Service (“IaaS”), and deployment models (e.g., private cloud, community cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, etc.). An environment that implements the cloud computing model is often referred to as a cloud computing environment.
A cloud computing environment may include a number of data centers, each having an enormous amount of computing resources such as processing power, memory, storage, bandwidth, and so forth. A data center might be, for example, a sophisticated business location employing hundreds of individuals, and including perhaps hundreds or thousands or racks of servers. Each data center is located within a particular region of the world, and for cloud services that are sensitive to region or latency, tend to support cloud services offered in that particular region. While a data center might be quite large, as the demand for cloud computing increases in that region, the utilization of the data center can also increase to the point where most of the data center is utilized.